Our international conference seeks to interrogate the relation between Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and technology. This relation has mainly been indirectly and obliquely studied in the past despite it being central in Jacques Derrida’s philosophical writings. Moreover, this confrontation is proving unavoidable for all those who, today, engage in the work of deconstruction and search, through this approach, for concrete possibilities capable of responding to our contemporary world. How does deconstruction relate to the advances and the developments of technology? In which manner can deconstruction redefine our relation to what Heidegger labelled, somewhat negatively, the “planetary devastation of technology”? Does deconstruction engage another relation towards technology – other than condemnation or celebration? Our task is thus to develop a philosophical rapport to the advances of technology which would, at once, measure its possible drifts and misdeeds as well as evaluate its obvious progresses by refusing to simply subscribe to technology or proscribe it.

How does technology affect the meaning and orientation for human beings today? How does the becoming of technology affect the status of experience, and consequently of knowledge, of the relation to the other, of the political sphere, and most particularly of democracy? In which manner can deconstruction propose not only a description of this phenomena, but also the means for concrete engagement capable of inventing unedited forms of criticalstances in the wake of the proliferating offenses spurred on by uncontrolled uses of technology: surveillance of populations, collection of private information, uniformity of singularities and language, “robotisation” and artificial intelligence, some of which Derrida had labelled under the terms “telecommunication” and “tele-technology” and from which he deployed a deconstructive questioning of “globalatinization” and novel analyses of concepts such as the archive, media, cinema, photography, writing, image, etc.

This conference will welcome philosophers, writers, historians and psychoanalysts from May 2nd to 4th, 2019 at the Columbia Global Center in Paris. We hope, in this manner, to concretely engage Jacques Derrida’s thinking in a meaningful confrontation with technology and thus with our contemporary world: its risks and opportunities, its past and its future.

This conference will also inaugurate the Jacques Derrida International Philosophical Association.